This invention relates to an information handling mechanism.
Many existing information handling systems apply an input to a specialist database to give some meaningful output. In all cases it is assumed that the database has some relevance to the input, perhaps because a user or an automatic mechanism has specifically chosen that database.
For example patent specification U.S. Pat. No. 5,488,725A describes a document retrieval system where it is assumed that the information-source is appropriate for any search being made.
Patent specification U.S. Pat. No. 5,418,948A describes a method for pre-processing a natural language search-query to produce a different search-query which is more appropriate for use with a document retrieval system. This system assumes that the information-source is appropriate for the search.
Patent U.S. Pat. No. 6,598,039B1 describes a document retrieval system; it assumes that the information-source is appropriate for the search.
Patent WO02/21259A1 describes a system of integrating several data-sources and searching across them such that different parts of the search-query involve different data-sources. This system likewise assumes that the information-source is appropriate for the search.
All these known systems suffer from the problem that the assumption that the information source is appropriate for the search may be incorrect.